January 8, 2009

• We buried a neighbor's cat today, found his crumpled body across the street.  Mike dug a hole under the apricot tree, one of the few places there is enough soil over the famous Mentone rocks to dig more than a foot deep.  I rolled the dolly to where the regal giant of a cat lay and hefted the gorgeous animal onto it. 

  We have been shooing this animal away for several weeks, assuming he was a tom cat looking for trouble.  He was a beauty, long thick orange tabby fur, with a wide Maine Coon face and large, intelligent eyes.  I took advantage of his diminished capacity to resist and made a closer examination of his private parts. 

  What I didn't find broke my heart.  He wasn't a tom cat.  He was someone's cherished, neutered pet.  One of my neighbors will be calling him home for dinner, wondering why he doesn't show up.  So, tomorrow I must go door to door, trying to find his staff, to let them know of his fate.  If you've never lost a cat you probably wonder why I would go to such lengths, but if you have, I don't need to explain. 

  Years ago, I had a one in a million, Maine Coon tabby named Studley Dude.  This cat was as affectionate as any dog I've ever known.  He would run to greet me when I came home from work, and the moment I set my purse aside, he would leap up and wrap his arms around my neck, bury his face in my hair and purr loudly in my ear.  One day I came home and he wasn't there to greet me.

  For three days I searched the neighborhood.  I went door to door asking if anyone had found his body.  I was sick with worry.  My worries were well founded.  We finally found him under the tool bench in the garage where he had crawled after having been hit by a car.  His jaw was broken and he had maggots festering in his wounds.  He was alive but badly dehydrated. 

  It was the Fourth of July so the only vet available was the emergency clinic about twenty miles away.  All the way to the clinic, I steeled myself for the vet's determination that he would need to be put down.  In retrospect, it would have been kinder to have put him to sleep, but the emergency vet thought he stood a good good chance of surviving.  He wired the jaw back together and stitched his lower lip back on.  The maggots had eaten away the dead tissue leaving a nice clean wound in his leg that healed without further treatment.  After a day on an IV drip to get him rehydrated he came home to convalesce. 

  The recovery was slow and painful and required additional surgery to remove the wires after the jaw healed.  For days I forced broth between his teeth to keep him hydrated until at last he would attempt to drink on his own.  He bravely allowed me to slip antibiotics into his traumatized mouth several times a day for weeks.  Somehow he got through it and instead of hating me for all the torture I had inflicted, he seemed to realize I had helped him and was more attached than ever. 

  Studley Dude was never allowed to roam outside without a chaperon again and lived to a ripe old age.  The point of this tale is that the three days of not knowing where he was or what had happened to him were far worse than anything that followed.  I need to find the people who loved the little orange lion and put their mind at peace.   

    

  • 12:33 am
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